I have attended LETI conference last June and remember the paper presented by Alain Merle, their security guru. Alain said that smart cards are secured because up to 50% of the Silicon area is dedicated to security. When you design a SoC to address applications like smart metering, NFC payment or embedded SIM, you know in advance … Read More
Semiconductor Intellectual Property
CEO Interview: Rene Donkers of Fractal Technologies
Fractal is another one of those very successful emerging EDA companies that you don’t read a lot about, except on SemiWiki. Rene Donkers is co-founder and CEO of Fractal Technologies, a company addressing IP quality assurance. This is a niche in the SoC tooling market that deserves some justification. Why not use an IP as-is… Read More
Bringing the Semiconductor IP Community Together!
Next week is the first REUSE Semiconductor IP Tradeshow and Conference at the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley. The presentation abstracts are up now and there are a few I want to highlight as they are companies that we work with on SemiWiki.… Read More
Autonomous Driving, Let’s Be Realistic!
Last week I have attended to the webinar from CEVA ““Challenges of Vision Based Autonomous Driving & Facilitation of An Embedded Neural Network Platform” and I loved that I have heard and seen. For the first time since I read about autonomous driving, I have seen a realistic roadmap and not a geek’s fantasy, suggesting that you… Read More
Webinar: Improve Security For IoT Edge Devices With Custom SoCs
The only thing hotter than IoT on SemiWiki.com right now is IoT Security. In 2016 we saw a record amount of reported cyber security breaches with compelling consequences (US Presidential Election) and that trend will continue. The most recent DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks using botnets on insecure IoT devices … Read More
eSilicon Demonstrates Potent Memory IP Evaluation Platform
With memories taking up in some cases over 50% of the area of many ASIC designs, their selection and implementation can affect everything from power and timing to the choice of packaging. As a result, the process of deciding among all the options for ASIC memories becomes time and energy intensive. Memory selection even affects … Read More
IoT Worms Could Spread Like Zombies
Security researchers recently created a proof-of-concept attack against Internet connected lightbulbs, causing breached devices to reach out and infect their neighbors. Propagation continues and spreads itself across the community. This hack highlights the insecurity in one of many IoT network protocols.
Researchers… Read More
Dolphin Webinar “The proven recipe for uLP SoC”
Dolphin will hold a live webinar on November 15, 9:00 AM PST or November 22, 10:00 AM GMT. This webinar targets the SoC designers wanting to learn how to quickly implement ultra-low power (uLP) techniques, using proven recipes.… Read More
IP-SoC 2016: IP Innovation, Foundries, IoT and Security
The next IP-SoC conference will be held in Grenoble, France, on December 6-7, 2016 after Shanghai in September and Bangalore, India, in April. This will be the 20[SUP]th[/SUP] edition of this unique IP centric event, as well as the celebration of Design And Reuse 20[SUP]th[/SUP] anniversary. Creating in 1997 a company fully dedicated… Read More
One chip and the MCU variant challenge disappears
Merchant microcontrollers are usually made available in a wide range of variants based on one architecture with different peripheral payloads and packaging options. A couple of companies, notably Cypress with their PSoC families and Silicon Labs with the EFM8 Laser Bee… Read More


EDA Has a Value Capture Problem — An Outsider’s View